September 11 as New York Magazine's Big What If

With four weeks until the fifth anniversary of September 11, lots of magazines are rolling out their "September 11 think pieces." And New York devotes their cover feature to "What If 9/11 Never Happened?," with essays from a wide variety of people - Andrew Sullivan gives a faux blog, Slate's Supreme Court correspondent Dahlia Lithwick has a scary view of what the law would be like, writer Tom Wolfe (who suggests the same), deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff says there would not be as many big development projects, and Reverend Al Sharpton claims that Fernando Ferrer would be elected mayor. What if's indeed. It's a good feature - we're not sure we like some of the examples, because it becomes almost too easily reduced, but an interesting anlysis, though, is from political guru Hank Sheinkopf:

Mark Green would have been the mayor. Rudy Giuliani would have been run out of town on a rail. Of course, 3,000 people would still be alive. And Larry Silverstein wouldn’t be in the news every day. The most amazing thing of all is that people stayed. We didn’t really grasp the significance of this place, that it was more than just a financial combine. New York became a human place for people. We didn’t realize who we were before: We are the center of the world. And I don’t think we ever really understood what that meant before that day.